posted at 12:01 pm on June 26, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Every President since Jimmy Carter left office has had reason to wish that Jimmy Carter had left the planet, too, perhaps to colonize Mars for future peanut farmers. Even Bill Clinton ended up tripping over Carter’s idiotic intervention in North Korea, which let Kim Jong-il off the hook that Clinton had carefully crafted. Now Barack Obama gets to enjoy his predecessor’s political interventions, in this case aimed at Obama specifically:

A former U.S. president is accusing the current president of sanctioning the “widespread abuse of human rights” by authorizingdrone strikes to kill suspected terrorists.

Jimmy Carter, America’s 39 th president, denounced the Obama administration for “clearly violating” 10 of the 30 articles of theUniversal Declaration of Human Rights, writing in a New York Times op-ed on Monday that the “United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.”

“Instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends,” Carter wrote.

The op-ed itself is rather bizarre, including this statement:

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable.

Er, what? No one has ever suggested that people other than terrorists don’t get killed by drone strikes, and there is no “rule” that declares all the dead as terrorists — although I’m sure that some would like to believe it. But that’s the nature of any kind of bombing, not just those conducted by drones. Arguably, drone strikes can limit the “collateral damage” of other bombing techniques with hyper-accurate targeting and stealthy approaches, which is not to say mistakes aren’t made. The US and Pakistan got into a row over the deaths of two dozen Pakistani soldiers from a misdirected strike last year, for instance.

Why conduct the bombing at all, if civilians are at risk? For the past eleven years, the US position has been that terrorist networks declared war on the US, and that we will pursue them militarily and economically, using all tools at our disposal. We further warned nations that shelter terrorist networks (willingly or unwillingly) that we would not respect their sovereignty when used as a shield to hide these combatants in a war they declared on us. Civilian deaths occur in every war (in other words, “inevitable”), but they result in these cases from the nature of the terrorists, who hide among civilians while conducting their war against us. The only other option in that case is to do nothing, a policy which anyone familiar with Carter’s presidency will recognize. This, by the way, is the true definition of the Bush Doctrine, which Obama has followed.

Don’t like drone strikes? Get rid of your terrorists. Otherwise, we intend to defeat the terrorist networks that declared war on the US and succeeded in murdering nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Those networks grew into lethal form long before we stated targeting them with drone strikes, something that Carter’s trite and insipid argument that “the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations” ignores. In fact, it’s a lot more true that Carter’s year-long demonstration of impotence at the hands of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini boosted jihadi recruitment a lot more than drone strikes ever did.

Blowback

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Every President sane American citizen with an IQ over 40 since Jimmy Carter left office has had reason to wish that Jimmy Carter had left the planet, too, perhaps to colonize Mars for future peanut farmers.

Reverse future karma — somewhere out there, there’s a 15-year-old future chief executive who’s going to get called racist by former Democratic President Barack Obama sometime around 2050 (which will likely be no different than the same treatment President Romney’s going to get from Obama in 2013…)

He has enough trouble keeping up with his own idiotic foreign policy, but now I know without a doubt the drone strikes are correct and acceptable. Whatever Carter says, do the opposite and you’ll always be right.

Every President sane American citizen with an IQ over 40 since Jimmy Carter left office has had reason to wish that Jimmy Carter had left the planet, too, perhaps to colonize Mars for future peanut farmers.

MessesWithTexas on June 26, 2012 at 12:06 PM

Well, that could have well been within the realm of possibility had Gingrich won he GOP nomination and the WH eventually :)…

His raving dementia, dhimmitude, and socialist lunacy aside, Carter was a humble, frugal, and relatively honest individual whom you wouldn’t hesitate to shake hands with. Just trying to imagine what Hussein Ogabe will turn into come January gives me nightmares.

“Er, what? No one has ever suggested that people other than terrorists don’t get killed by drone strikes, and there is no “rule” that declares all the dead as terrorists — although I’m sure that some would like to believe it. But that’s the nature of any kind of bombing, not just those conducted by drones. ”

Actually, Carter is correct. The Obama administration has instituted a policy that any male of adult age killed by a drone strike that is within a certain distance of a known terrorist is declared an enemy combatant (after the fact).

The purpose is to increase the enemy combatant killed number and the civilian casualty number down in the newspaper articles that parrot the talking points of the administration. Under Bush, that was not true, hence greater civilian casaulties under Bush was a consequence of more honest accounting.

Hence, every liberal’s tactic of guilt by association is taken to its logical extreme.

You can argue the legitimacy of the policy, Ed, and that is good discussion.

But you can’t dismiss Carter is right in that narrow point – or that there is something Orwellian about declaring someone killed by bombs an enemy by proximity to an enemy. Or that this attitude is generally revealing about the administration’s attitude toward misinformation flow.

Could have been a pizza delivery guy, after all. Or a kebab delivery guy. (But definitely not a BBQ Pork ribs delivery guy). But they were guilty of terror by being near the scene.

As much as I am not a fan of Carter, I do like seeing him heckle the One – and as he has a greater chance of elevating insane lefties as to some of the administration’s hypocrisy and misleading dealings, that is a good thing. Voter enthusiasm and all.

(And my apologies if I seem to make light of what is otherwise a serious topic of terror, death, and national interest with a pork BBQ joke).

Every President since Jimmy Carter left office has had reason to wish that Jimmy Carter had left the planet, too, perhaps to colonize Mars for future peanut farmers.

Those of us one day hoping to colonize Mars join with Mars itself in objecting to any suggestion that James Earl Carter Jr ever be allowed to step foot on Mars, and we demand an immediate apology for the suggestion…

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

It’s buried on page 3 of the online version of the 05/29/2012 NYT article about Obama’s kill list (“Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will”). Guess it got lost in the kerfuffle about leaks.

His raving dementia, dhimmitude, and socialist lunacy aside, Carter was a humble, frugal, and relatively honest individual whom you wouldn’t hesitate to shake hands with. Just trying to imagine what Hussein Ogabe will turn into come January gives me nightmares.

Archivarix on June 26, 2012 at 12:19 PM

Agreed on all counts. I also admired Carter for making no bones about being a born-again Christian. Although I’ve come to learn that his definition of Christian doctrine is very different from mine, that still impressed me.

His raving dementia, dhimmitude, and socialist lunacy aside, Carter was a humble, frugal, and relatively honest individual whom you wouldn’t hesitate to shake hands with. Just trying to imagine what Hussein Ogabe will turn into come January gives me nightmares.

Arafat’s Nobel is a massive repudiation of the Isreali apartheid state, in which case I support it.

libfreeordie on June 26, 2012 at 12:34 PM

Since Israel is not and never has been an apartheid state, what you are really stating here is your support for Anti-Semitic racist beliefs and behavior, thanks for clarifying that you racist Anti-Semitic puke.

and there is no “rule” that declares all the dead as terrorists — although I’m sure that some would like to believe it.

Ed, Carter isn’t too far off here about Obama’s policy. Carter didn’t say that all the dead from a drone strike are terrorists. He said “any man” is. According to AP’s post below about the NYT article on drones, the CIA considers any military age male in a strike zone to be an enemy combatant.

Arafat’s Nobel is a massive repudiation of the Isreali apartheid state, in which case I support it.

libfreeordie on June 26, 2012 at 12:34 PM

SImon Peres, YItzhak Rabin and Arafat were awarded the Nobel Prize jointly in 1994, retard…how could it have been a repudiafion of the ‘Israel apartheid State’ when two of the recipients were fhe Israeli PM and the future Israeli president? Why do the dims send all the retarded trolls at HA?? No troll with a brain left??